HOW U.S. DESTROYED PROGRESSIVE SECULAR FORCES IN AFGHANISTAN

By Deirdre Griswold

The media are suddenly full of opinions about Afghanistan, now
that the Bush administration is accusing Osama bin Laden and
other Islamic fundamentalists of being behind the attacks on
the World Trade Center and Pentagon.

In the 1980s, the reactionary political elements now ruling
Afghanistan were working with the CIA to overthrow a
progressive Afghani government supported by the Soviet
Union. After the spending of an ocean of blood and billions of
U.S. dollars, the reactionaries won.

Washington was happy and unconcerned as its protégés went on to
butcher Afghani progressives, restore landlordism and repress
women while fighting among themselves.

The eventual triumph of the Taleban faction represented a
catastrophe for the Afghani people. Just in the last year
thousands of Afghani refugees have died of starvation and
exposure and Kabul, the capital, is such a wasteland that the
U.S., demanding vengeance, can't even find anything to bomb.

On Oct. 10, 1996, Workers World printed the following article
about how the U.S. strangled a popular revolution led by the
Progressive Democratic Party of Afghanistan (PDPA) against
feudalism and imperialism.

Not that long ago, the bourgeoisie could still feel pride in
their revolutionary history. They continued to celebrate the
1789 French Revolution and many other great victories in the
struggle against feudal oppression.

They even spoke approvingly of the 1917 overthrow of the
czarist autocracy in Russia. The problem, they said, was that
the Bolsheviks had spoiled that struggle for democracy by going
too far.

But capitalism in this rotten age of U.S. imperialist conquest
of the globe has degenerated so far from its revolutionary
roots that it is now, to borrow a phrase from Henry Kissinger,
to the right of the czar. And it is celebrating the return of
absolute feudal rule in Afghanistan.

The powerful media engines, their reach multiplied by the most
modern technologies, are presenting the world with instant
photographic images of a lynching--that's all it was--of the
few progressives left in Kabul. .

To make the deed more palatable, the media use adjectives like
"butcher" to describe former President Najibullah and his
aides. Dragged out of the United Nations compound where they
had sought asylum for the last four years, they were beaten to
death and then left hanging for all to see.

But among themselves, foreign-policy experts for the
U.S. establishment know that the Afghani progressives' real
crime was that they tried to carry out a social transformation
in their country in the direction of socialism.

What authority bears witness to this? None other than the
U.S. Department of the Army itself.

The Pentagon puts out what it calls country study books on
almost every country in the world. They are updated every few
years. These books contain basic information for the use of
U.S. personnel traveling or working abroad. There's nothing
classified in them. They're available in most libraries.

"Afghanistan--a Country Study" for 1986 has of course the
anti-communist line expected of a Pentagon publication. But it
also contains much useful information about the changes
instituted by the Afghani Revolution of 1978.

Freeing women and peasants
--

Before the revolution, 5 percent of Afghanistan's rural
landowners owned more than 45 percent of the arable land. A
third of the rural people were landless laborers, sharecroppers
or tenants.

Debts to the landlords and to money lenders "were a regular
feature of rural life," says the U.S. Army report. An indebted
farmer turned over half his crop each year to the money lender.

"When the PDPA took power, it quickly moved to remove both
landownership inequalities and usury," says the Pentagon
report. Decree number six of the revolution canceled mortgage
debts of agricultural laborers, tenants and small landowners.

The revolutionary regime set up extensive literacy programs,
especially for women. It printed textbooks in many
languages--Dari, Pashtu, Uzbek, Turkic and Baluchi. "The
government trained many more teachers, built additional schools
and kindergartens, and instituted nurseries for orphans," says
the country study.

Before the revolution, female illiteracy had been 96.3 percent
in Afghanistan. Rural illiteracy of both sexes was 90.5
percent.

By 1985, despite a counter-revolutionary war financed by the
CIA, there had been an 80-percent increase in hospital
beds. The government initiated mobile medical units and
brigades of women and young people to go to the undeveloped
countryside and provide medical services to the peasants for
the first time.

Among the very first decrees of the revolutionary regime were
to prohibit bride-price and give women freedom of choice in
marriage. "Historically," said the U.S. manual, "gender roles
and women's status have been tied to property relations. Women
and children tend to be assimilated into the concept of
property and to belong to a male."

Also: "A bride who did not exhibit signs of virginity on the
wedding night could be murdered by her father and/or brothers."

The revolution was challenging all this.

Young women in the cities, where the new government's authority
was strong, could tear off the veil, freely go out in public,
attend school and get a job. They were organized in the
Democratic Women's Organization of Afghanistan, founded in 1965
by Dr. Anahita Ratebzada.

Ratebzada's companion, Babrak Karmal, was one of the young
revolutionaries who had formed the People's Democratic Party of
Afghanistan in that same year and would later become president
of the country.

Repression and revolution
---

A revolution was literally thrust upon this young party in
1978. The reactionary government of Mohammad Daoud, which was
close to both the shah of Iran and the United States, arrested
almost the entire leadership of the PDPA on April 26,
1978. There had been a huge funeral procession just a week
earlier for a murdered member of the party, and the progressive
masses in Kabul saw the new arrests as an attempt to annihilate
the party just as the military junta had done to the workers'
parties in Chile in 1973.

An uprising by the lower ranks of the military freed the
popular party leader, Nur Mohammad Taraki--the soldiers
actually broke down his prison walls with a tank. Within a day,
Daoud was overthrown and a revolutionary government proclaimed,
headed by Taraki.

This uprising of the soldiers and the city masses, many of them
low-paid civil servants in a country with very little industry,
was every bit as glorious as earlier revolutions against feudal
tyranny in Europe. It held the promise of breaking down the old
traditions based on oppression and fear.

The leaders of the PDPA were educated, although some, like
Taraki, came from very poor families. But they had been to
Kabul University, some had studied abroad, and they yearned to
bring enlightenment and material progress to Afghanistan.

Had all this happened 150 years ago, the feudals would have
been overthrown and Afghanistan welcomed into the fold of
progressive bourgeois nations. But that was before the age of
imperialism, and especially before the era of proletarian
revolutions and the Cold War.

The U.S. CIA began building a mercenary army, recruiting feudal
warlords and their servants for a "holy war" against the
communists, who had liberated "their" women and "their"
peasants. Washington spent billions of dollars every year on
the war.

The only country in the area ready to help the Afghani
Revolution was the Soviet Union. The USSR intervened
militarily. But it could not defeat this well-armed
counter-revolutionary force.

Every battle was a test not only of Soviet military might but
of the political resolve of its leaders. They finally withdrew
the troops in 1989 as the shift to the right within the USSR
became critical.

The war in Afghanistan began some 18 years ago. It continued
long after the last progressive government in Kabul fell in
1992. The recent stage has been an orgy of destruction as rival
reactionary groups fought for control of the capital, now
mostly destroyed.

More than 2 million Afghanis have been killed in this struggle,
and millions more made refugees. Now half the remaining
population--the women--have been returned to the status of
property without a single human right. A poor man unable to pay
his debts can have his hand cut off for theft.

The schools and clinics built by the revolution are in
ruins. The Taleban--a fundamentalist group supported by
Pakistan that was trained and armed by the U.S. CIA--has taken
the capital and is pursuing the war northward, toward the
border with what were the Central Asian Soviet republics.

This is the hideous face of counter-revolution. Afghanistan has
been dragged back more than 100 years. But it was the most
modern weapons and communications systems, made in the USA,
that killed the progressive dream of a generation of Afghani
social revolutionaries.

- END -

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